Cost Accounting
BBUS 373 -- Spring 2013
Instructor: P.K.Sen
Office: UW1-132
Phone: 425-352-5432
Email: pksen@u.washington.edu
Black Board Course Website http://bb.uwb.edu
ROOM Sec A: UW1 021
Sec B: UW1 110
Sec C: UW1 221
TIME (MW) Sec A: 08:45-10:45
Sec B: 13:15-15:15
Sec C: 17:45-19:45
FINAL EXAM Mon, June 10, In your class hours
OFFICE HRS M W 11:00 –12, 3:30-5:30 and by appointment
Teaching Assistant The details will be notified in the class.
I. Objectives:
This course aims to introduce to you how to identify, analyze and report cost information to managers who can use it for strategy formulation, decision making and management control. It is user oriented because you need to understand the user’s needs if you are to serve the users effectively. Managers use cost information for planning and decision making, for economic evaluation of business activities, for product costing and for performance evaluation and control of subordinates. Besides “how to”, this course will often go beyond the textbook to ask the question why we adopt a certain technique and its usefulness. A major goal, therefore, is to develop knowledge of both relevance and limitations of accounting data to internal management and how to combine non-financial data with costs and other accounting information for decision making and control. Specifically, you will develop skills to prepare and interpret cost reports under different cost systems, understand how to evaluate information for their relevance for decision making, evaluate performance of a production system’s consumption of resources, use cost allocation methods for product costing and incentives reasons, and develop a rudimentary knowledge of management control systems.
II. Structure of the Course and Pedagogy:
This course builds significantly on the knowledge you acquired in the Introductory Managerial Accounting Course, B BUS 221. Therefore, you will do well to refresh your memory of the concepts and techniques you learned in that class. We will offer a brief review of those concepts and build upon those concepts and further develop our analysis based on those concepts. The class meets for two hours twice a week. A class schedule with a list of topics to be covered follows. For each class, there are assigned readings, mostly chapters from the textbook, and a set of problems to be prepared. The lectures will be based on the assigned readings and the "Class Problems" mentioned in the syllabus. You should go over the problems mentioned in the syllabus to become familiar with the facts. We will solve these problems in the class. You would need to work in groups for the case analyses. I strongly recommended that you form study groups at the end of the first class meeting. A study group should consist of no more than five individuals and no less than four individuals.
III. Textbook and Readings: Cost Accounting: A Managerial Emphasis, by Charles T. Horngren, Srikant Datar and Madhav Rajan (HDR), 14th edition, Prentice Hall, 2012. (Required). There are various options with supplements available at the publisher’s website that you should consider carefully. http://www.mypearsonstore.com/bookstore/cost-accounting-plus-new-myaccountinglab-with-pearson-9780132960649 Harvard Case: Camelback Communication Product No: 185179-PDF-ENG
Supplemental readings, cases that are not from the book will be made available through Black Board.
IV. Blackboard Resources This course assumes some familiarity with Excel. The course has a Black Board web site that has the copies of slides used in the lectures, supplemental readings and the cases, and this class schedule. The most important page is this syllabus page, which summarizes the useful information. The actual PowerPoint slides used in class presentation will not be stored at the web site. The copies of PowerPoint slides in PDF format is available to you and you can view and